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Innovating product support

Cognizant’s VP of Technology Practice, Yoosuf Mohamed had observed that post-sales support is fast emerging as the key competitive advantage for staying relevant and winning market share.

But there is much more than just market share, at stake. For example, product innovation.

Self-help” tools for helping customers and “assisted-help” tools for empowering agents are outcomes of product innovation.

Yoosuf Mohamed

Through data analytics, the product engineering team will be able to provide the right combination of tools for the agent and deliver a better assisted help experience to customers.

Yoosuf gave examples saying, “Providing frontline support employees with the authority to offer refunds or incentives to wow their customers is an interesting way of empowering them. Providing them the right learning solutions enables them to deliver extraordinary customer experience.”

Addressing pain points
These tools are conceptualized based on user insights gained from various pain points encountered by customers and agents, said Yoosuf.

The ‘agent desktop’ provides complete, live dynamic view of support agents’ functions in a single view. It shows clearly what the priority cases are and which ones are close to breaching the SLA.

Support Halo obtains insights into what customers like and also offers insights into specific features or functions that are most useful or difficult to use.

Yoosuf pointed out that these insights can be shared with the product development team and can form the basis of decisions related to new products and product features.

“Customers also feel empowered and there is closed-loop feedback,” he said.

For example, Salesforce.com has a user community where users can request a change in a product/product feature. This community can vote for or against the change, which indicates how important the change is.